Dan Aykroyd has taken to Facebook to further comment upon the Ghostbusters remake, expanding on comments he made to Britain’s Channel 4 that LRM discussed a couple days ago. In the comment, he changes his tune on whether or not the original characters should have been involved.

Paul Feig made a good movie and had a superb cast and plenty of money to do it. We just wish he had been more inclusive to the originators. It cost everyone as it is unlikely Kristen, Leslie, Melissa and Kate will ever reprise their roles as Ghostbusters which is sad.

Where to begin. As the screenwriter of the original movie and with his agent Bernie Brillstein as one of the producers, Dan had a lot more power than your average screenwriter and actor when it came to a potential remake. Add onto that the fact that Ivan Reitman, the original director, had a clause that allowed him to direct any potential sequels, and you have a situation where the originators had a lot more control over a potential remake than say Erik Estrada did with the CHIPS remake. To be clear, that doesn’t mean he had full veto power to nix the movie but the ball was in his court to get the original cast involved with a sequel and he failed. The fact is, the studio tried for years to get a third film in the works with the originators but the scripts Aykroyd wrote, which saw the Ghostbusters find themselves in hell, along with Bill Murray steering clear of the project, ended up forcing the studio’s hand to go in another direction.

With hindsight being twenty twenty, the direction they went in failed. It failed hard. Unlike some, I don’t believe it failed because women were cast in the lead roles. That’s nonsense. One, I think a straight remake for a classic such as Ghostbusters was doomed to fail straight from the start no matter who was cast. They should have went the soft reboot way, similar to The Force Awakens or Jurassic World, essentially a remake but taking place in the original world with the original characters passing the torch to the new generation. Second, if you take the stigma of Ghostbusters out of the remake and just title it “Generic Paranormal Patrol” or something like that, the remake from Paul Feig was not very good. It wasn’t horrible by any means. It was a mediocre film that did nothing to make me excited to see this team at work again.

So what do you think? Do you agree with what Dan Aykroyd said? What were your thoughts on the Ghostbusters remake? What could have made that movie work? Sound off in the comments section below.

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